The reason why I can not tell——
explains our feelings rather perfectly. We were tired; at least E. M. was exhausted, and Celia and I were tired probably in sympathy. Also it is always disappointing to start out for a place and not be able to get there, and little things sometimes sum up a feeling of depression quite out of proportion to their importance.
We went over bad pavement, and came to some more that was torn up, so that the city had an upheaved effect. It was all drenched in rain, and the little we saw of it looked ugly and brown, and finally our rooms were completely sapping to joyfulness of spirit. Perhaps if we had come from a hotel less attractive than the Black Hawk in Davenport, we should not have so keenly felt the contrast, but the rooms we were in depressed us to the verge of melancholia. Dingy bottle-green paper, a stained carpet, a bathroom in which the plumbing wouldn’t work, a depressing view of a torn-up street! I wandered around the cow-path surrounding my big bed in my narrow room, looked out at the weeping sky, and wondered whether we were going to have this sort of thing all the way—these dust-filled hideous rooms, cleaned only with a carpet sweeper; these sooty, ugly, busy, noisy towns. And the meals—those anemic chilled potatoes, beans full of strings, everything slapped on plates any which way, and everything tasting as though it had come out of the same dishwater!
Whenever I am far away from home and uncomfortable, I think of the story Eleanor Hoyt Brainard once told me. After a long chapter of misadventures on one of those dreadful journeys where she missed the good boat and rocked about on a little one, failed to get accommodations at the places that she counted on, and as a last straw took a wrong continental train, and finally too exhausted to sleep was settling herself for the night in the corner of a third-class day coach, she began to cry. To her husband’s amazed and concerned questioning, “Oh, dear!” she sobbed, “it’s just come over me we have a perfectly good home! And I wonder why we don’t stay in it more!”
When my article appeared in Collier’s, a Cedar Rapids newspaper arose in wrath and said we must have put up at a third-rate hotel. I agree with its rating, but was told it was the best in town. I do realize, however, it is a very distorted judgment that appraises a town by a few rooms in an hotel. Unless you can stay in a city long enough to know some of its people, to learn something about its atmosphere and personality, your opinion of it is as valueless as your opinion of a play would be, after seeing only the posters on the outside of the theater. Yet if you are a transient tourist, it is the room you are shown into that necessarily colors your impression of that city. If your room is fresh and clean and comfortable, you give the attributes of newness, cleanness and up-to-dateness to the city itself. An ugly, down-at-heels, uncomfortable hotel makes you think the same of the city. You can’t help it, can you? Besides which we had come to see the country and not stop, rained in, for indefinite periods in towns that differed in no way from dozens of others in the East. It was the West, the real great, free, open West we had come to see. Ranches, cowboys, Indians, not little cities like sample New Yorks.
At the hotel there was a large Bakers’ Convention. A suggestively domestic affair in more ways than one, since many had brought their wives. As though in advertisement of the nourishing quality of a wheat diet, men and women were nearly all pleasingly plump. We noticed also, that every man without exception had a solitaire diamond ring on his wedding-ring finger. Sometimes the wife had only a wide gold wedding-ring, but her husband was in diamonds. I don’t know whether bread is a specialty of Cedar Rapids, or whether an effort was made to do particular honor to the bakers, but bread was the one thing on the menu that proved to be really good.
There were two bakers and their wives, elderly couples, who sat at the next table to us. One of the wives had a wretched cough and the other was rather deaf; and to the combination we owe an anecdote that I hope they did not mind our overhearing, or my repeating.
It seems the husband of the wife who had the cough, sent for a doctor who had been out night after night on serious cases until the poor man was completely exhausted. In order to listen to the patient’s breathing he put his head on her chest and told her to “count four.” The husband came into the room and heard his wife counting, “One hundred and forty-six—one hundred and forty-seven——” and the doctor sound asleep!
It was in Cedar Rapids, too, that our waitress told us about an automobile she had just bought, to drive out in the evenings! As a newspaper afterwards printed in criticism of my above remark, “Tips in the West may be larger than the earnings of dyspeptic authoresses in the East!”